Monday, February 27, 2012

Knowledge, Learning and Community

The intent of these short contributions to the #Change11 course is to
allow guest speakers to summarize their sum contribution to the field
of online learning and new educational technology. Though I have
recently become better known because of my contributions to connectivism
and to the concept of the massive open online course, these are
reflective of a wider philosophy that has characterized my work as a
whole much more generally. In the early 2000s I took to characterizing
it under the heading of knowledge, learning and community – I even
posted an eBook with that title. I’d like to return to that framework in
order to describe my contributions to the field today.

These three are intended to be represented as a cycle. Knowledge
informs learning; what we learn informs community; and the community in
turn creates knowledge. And the reverse: knowledge builds community,
while community defines what is learned, and what is learned becomes
knowledge. The three are aspects of what is essentially the same
phenomenon, representations of communications and structures that are
created by individuals interacting and exchanging experiences. So I have
examined each of these three in detail, as well as the languages of
communication between them, and as well as the experiences that inform
them.

Knowledge

The traditional model of knowledge is what we may call propositional
or representative: it consists of a series of signs, expressions,
propositions or representations, which stand in relation to an external
reality, or some subset of it, such that properties of that external
reality are reflected in the expression. Knowledge, properly so-called,
within such a framework consists of a set of such statements, models or
propositions, the ability to manipulate them in order to create
explanations, make predictions, or define concepts, and the ability to
apply those to the world.

Theories of knowledge in this paradigm are based almost entirely on
the properties of those signs, their origins, and how they are used to
generate and preserve truth or meaning. Take for example what has come
to be called the traditional definition of knowledge, “justified true
belief,” and its counterexamples. Knowledge is through to be a statement
or expression, like a belief. It is expected to correspond or correctly
represent the world, and hence be true. And it presupposes a connection
between that external world and the representation, which is a
justification.

This model has served us well over the years; it is the foundation
behind the scientific method, which consists of the creation of
representations that enable predictions to be tested experimentally. It
forms the foundation for logic and inference, which are the basis for
being able to tell when a statement someone makes is true, or false.

But it is a fiction. Our knowledge is not actually composed of
propositions and representations. As Wittgenstein has said, what we know
is more accurately demonstrated in what we do, and language derives its
meaning not from what it represents but by how we use it. The logical
structures we think comprise ‘knowledge’ are but one part of a far more
complex series of expressions, behaviours, interactions, manipulations,
creations, emotions and more, all of which point to a much deeper
structure. The words we use, the facts we describe, the principles and
rules we infer – these are simple abstractions of what we really know.

The theory I have advanced (and I am by no means the only person to
reason in this way) is that our knowledge is literally the set of
connections between neurons in the brain (or between bits in a computer,
or between people in a society, or between crickets in a forest). Our
knowledge is the state of organization that results in our brains and
bodies after our interactions with the world. For example, ‘to know that
Paris is the capital of France’ is not to have some sentence in the
brain, nor is it to be in possession of some fact, it is to be organized
in a certain way.

This state of ‘being organized in a certain way’ is manifest in
different ways. For an individual, to ‘know’ something is characterized
by a feeling of recognition. How do we ‘know’ a person is Fred? We
‘recognize’ him. Subjectively, we feel we ‘know’ something when we can’t
see the word differently; we see a tiger and can’t think of what we are
seeing as a horse. We visit Paris and can’t make sense of the
suggestion that we are not in the capital of France. We see ‘1+1’ and
don’t have any way to make that into ‘3’. We perceive what we know
through the actions of our own brains when presented with this or that
situation.

Learning

To learn that ‘Paris is the capital of France’ involves far more
than presentation and memory of the sentence or proposition that ‘Paris
is the capital of France’. Our actual knowledge of ‘Paris is the capital
of France’ consists of much more than the simple content contained in
such a sentence; it involves not only a knowledge of the language and
the conventions surrounding the language, but also the idea that ‘Paris’
is a city, that cities are the sorts of things that are capitals, and
more, an entire set of thoughts, feelings and behaviours that would be
appropriate of a person who knows such a thing.

To learn, therefore, that ‘Paris is the capital of France’, is to
incorporate, not a simple physical state, but instead to instantiate a
complex physical state, so complex it is beyond description. Indeed, we
say ‘Fred knows X’ because we have no way of describing the physical
state that constitutes ‘knowing X’. It is unique for each person, both
physically (there is no necessary nor sufficient set of connections that
consists ‘knowing X’) and conceptually (no two people mean exactly the
same thing by ‘X’).

The challenge of pedagogy, indeed, is that learning is not simply
remembering. If all that was needed was to enable a student to recite
back a set of facts, pedagogy would be simple; as in archaic schools, we
would simply have students recite the fact aloud until they could
repeat it back without error. But we know that a person does not know
‘Paris is the capital of France’ even if he recites that fact should he
turn around and book a flight to Marseilles to see the President.

To learn, therefore, even a simple fact (such as ‘Paris is the
capital of France’) or as much as an entire discipline (Chemistry,
Physics, economics) is to become like a person who already knows that
fact or practices that discipline. Part of being ‘like’ a person who
practices a discipline is agreement on the same set of facts, and
answering the same questions in the same way. But it also involves
seeing the world in the same way, recognizing some things as important
and other things as not, in approaching problems in the same way, having
the same standards of proof and reference, and more.

Historically, education has recognized this. The various tests and
exercises we ask students to perform are efforts to replicate the major
elements of practice undertaken by one who has already mastered the
relevant domain. In science, we set up labs and ask students to perform
‘experiments’. In mathematics, we pose ‘problems’ and in more advanced
classes as them to provide ‘proofs’. In carpentry students are asked to
build bookshelves. We are seeking to replicate not simple
representational states, but complex patterns of experience and
performance.

The best way to replicate an expert’s organizational state is to be
that person – to have the same DNA, the same physical environment, and
the same experiences. None of this is possible; each person is
physically, environmentally and experientially unique. But by exposing
the student to some aspect of the expert’s environment and experience we
can create something like the expert’s knowledge. And we can narrow in
on this through communication, either directly or indirectly (though a
teacher), about that experience. And we can develop a more concrete
personal understanding by trying out our own understanding in this
environment, creating new and unplanned experiences, which on reflection
we can relate to our own unique experiences.

I have expressed my (very unoriginal) theory of pedagogy very
simply: to teach is to model and demonstrate, to learn is to practice
and reflect. Both teaching and learning consist of talking about and of
doing. Theorizing and practicing. Abstracting and making concrete.
Nothing new there, but what is key is the attitude we take as we
understand that to learn is to emulate an entire organizational state
and not merely to possess a simple set of facts.

Community

The community is the place in which we have learning experiences,
and the environment through which we communicate with each other about
these experiences. It is at one moment the place where we learn and at
another moment the instantiation, as an artifact, of what we have
learned, as a society. It is at one moment the place where we
communicate, and at another moment, an expression of what we have
communicated.

A community is the totality of a society’s knowledge, and that
knowledge is contained not only in its law courts and libraries, but
also in its buildings and bridges, statues and artwork, community halls
and schools and taverns, houses, apartments, and cardboard shelters
built by people who live on the street.

A community is not the same as a brain – obviously – but we can talk
about a community learning in the same way we can talk about a person
learning. A community has experiences – whether an invasion or drought,
earthquakes, political upheaval, stock market fluctuations, pollution,
weather and all the other wider social and environmental phenomena that
we as a society experience as a whole. These experiences imprint and
shape the community as a whole – each person, working alone and with
others, creates one or another aspect of community in response to these –
builds houses to shelter against the storm, roads to travel to sources
of food, art to express our anguish or joy.

As with a human, no simple words can express what a community knows;
as with a human, what a community knows is reflected by what it does.
You would say, for example, that a society as a whole does not ‘know’
about global warming, does not ‘comprehend’ it, if it takes no action in
response to it; we individual members of a society may see the impact,
but the pain of the experience has not yet been felt by the whole.

Whether a community can know, whether its experiences can be
transformed into knowledge, depends on how the community is organized,
on how it can be organized. Rocks do not learn as much as humans because
they cannot be organized beyond simple alignments of their constituent
molecules. Moreover, rocks cannot express this organization through
present or future behaviour. The best rocks can do is to form a pile;
humans, through their creative acts and interactions with each other,
compose vastly more complex artifacts.

A community relates to its constituent members in several ways. In
is the environment within which a person experiences, practices and
learns. It is therefore a mechanism whereby the experiences of one
person may be replicated by another, through immersion in the same
environment. A factory isn’t simply a mechanism for building hammers; it
is a mechanism whereby one member is able to show another how hammers
are built (and how forges are used, and how labour is organized, and all
the rest). A community is also the medium through which one person
communicates with another. It create a thick network of connections,
whether of wire, highway, text or acoustics, through which signals are
sent and received.

We take great stock in the meaning expressed by these signals, in
the state of affairs in the world these signals are intended to
represent, but this focuses our attention artificially only on those
signals, or those aspects of signals, that are designed explicitly to
represent, and to disregard what is in fact the bulk of these
communications. A person may intend only to say ‘Paris is the capital of
France’, but a wealth of information is contained in that
communication, in the language, the tone, the context, the attitude, and
more. Not only is each expression an act, each act is also an
expression, and our communications are far more than the simple words
that express them.

Language

As a result of my understanding of knowledge, learning and community
I have a very broad concept of language, which to my mind the content
of any communicative act from one entity to another. As such, to my
mind, most language does not have ‘meaning’ as such – indeed, more
accurately, no language inherently has meaning.

A language may be thought of as an entity in its own right, with its
own internal form of organization, though arguably it is inseparable
from the community that creates it. As such, while I would be hesitant
to say that a language expresses knowledge, I feel comfortable in saying
that a language contains knowledge. For example, the fundamental
elements of written language – subjects and actions, objects, tenses and
connections – are expressions of elements of our knowledge of the
world. What (say) the English language says about us is that we see the
world as something that progresses through time and space, and contains
subjects and objects, which interact with each other. Other languages –
music, say, or bricks – say other things about us.

What is crucial to understand about language is that it reflects,
and does not prescribe. Put another way, the rules of language are not
the rules of the world. Language follows learning and experience, is
reflective of learning and experience, and does not constitute learning
and experience. A sentence is like a picture: an abstraction, a
snapshot, a moment, an artifice. It is not inherently true or false,
does not inherently contain its own meaning. When we read, when we
comprehend, a language, we do so by recognizing, and not by decoding.

Wednesday: We will talk about the implications of the principles
outlines in this introduction. In particular, we will describe the
elements of language, the principles for effective communities, and the
pedagogy of connectivism.

Friday: We will receive and discuss your activities for this week.
Participants will be asked to present their artifacts, as described
below. Then we will discuss them from the perspective of the principles
discussed on Wednesday.

Keep your learning artifact simple and to the point. For example,
describe how to add two numbers. Describe how to use Mr. Potato-head.
Describe the major cities of France.

2. Present your learning artifact

The simpler your artifact is, the easier this section will be. In
the presentation of the artifact, consider explicitly the three major
elements and how communication talks place throughout them:

- How does your learning artifact instantiate knowledge? And what is
the knowledge the artifact represents? Focus not simply on the
statement or expression of that knowledge, but also on the organization
that constitutes a deeper and more complex knowledge.

- How does a student use your artifact to learn? In what way does
the artifact replicate or emulate the experience and performance of a
person who already has this knowledge?

- What is the community around that knowledge – is it a community of
language speakers, or practitioners, of adherents of a faith? What
would characterize the community – does it revolve around an object, set
of beliefs, way of looking at the world? How does the community learn?

On Friday I will ask participants to present their knowledge
artifacts. At that time, in addition to considering the three elements
described here, I will consider the artifact in the light of the
principles introduced and discussed on Wednesday.

Stephen Downes is a senior researcher for Canada's National Research
Council and a leading proponent of the use of online media and services
in education. As the author of the widely-read OLDaily online newsletter, Downes has earned international recognition for his leading-edge work in the field of online learning.